Citi has just initiated research coverage of the networking space, and I think it’s useful to look at what they say and compare it with what my own surveys and modeling suggest. Wall Street, after all, makes money for people by guessing right on stock trends. The big “however” here is that sometimes it makes…
Happy Holidays from CIMI Corporation
CIMI Corporation, and I, would like to wish all of you a wonderful Holiday Season and a happy, healthy, and professionally rewarding New Year! Please share our holiday card at the link below. Tom Nolle, President CIMI 2013 Holiday Card Email and RSS:
Vendor Rankings on Buyer Influence, and What They Can Do About It
We’ve surveyed buyers since 1982 for enterprises and 1991 for network operators, both to find out what they’re planning to do and to find out what they think of vendors. I’ve been sharing some of the findings on plans and attitudes, and this seems a good time to share some on vendor influence. You’ll see…
IT Players Plans, and Buyers’ Thoughts, on SDN and NFV
One of the comments that was posted on one of my blogs (on LinkedIn) was that it was surprising that the IT vendors were not heard from much regarding SDN/NFV. I agree at one level; IT is the obvious beneficiary of this whole software-defined-stuff initiative set. However, there are IT vendors involved in the process…
Can Operations Join Top-Down and Bottom-Up in SDN and NFV?
With news that Intel is announcing a platform (“Highland Forest”) for hosting network functions for SDN and NFV and an HP exec is taking the role of chairing the ONF’s “northbound API” group, it would seem that our world of “software-defined-everything” is taking on new life. I hope so, but there’s still a question of…
Nudges that Could Add Up to a Big Push
Well, it’s catch-up Friday today, and there are a number of items that cropped up this week but didn’t make the cut for dedicating a blog entry. If you put them together you can see some forces acting to create industry change—not in a giant push but in nibbles. There’s a report that FCC Chairman…
Who Wins in SDN/NFV? Maybe Professional Services Groups!
Hardware, whether network or IT, is commoditizing in the view of most in the industry and on Wall Street. Software licenses now make up less than a quarter of the revenue of some major “software companies” and the open source movement is making credible progress toward making a big chunk of it free. What’s left? …
Analyzing the Wall Street View of Networking
It’s always fascinating to get a Wall Street view of networking, so I was happy to review the William Blair tech outlook. While I don’t always agree with the Street, they certainly have capabilities that I don’t in analyzing the financial trends. Even where we disagree, there’s value in contrasting the Street view with the…
Could the FCC’s VoIP Initiative Help Vendors?
I mentioned yesterday that the cable industry was regulated differently from telcos, and one of the differences is that cable is “capped” on maximum subscribers per provider. Many would like to see that regulation lifted to support M&A more broadly. In the telco space, there’s also an effort for regulatory change underway, this one linked…
Could Cable Operations Modernization Make the Industry an NFV Power?
“Cable” has always been seen as different from “telecom”. The industry is regulated differently, it’s primary profit sources are different, it has very different infrastructure, and it’s OSS/BSS/NMS tools and strategies are also different. Most insiders in the SDN world say that cable operators are less interested in SDN than telcos, and virtually everyone says…